A gathering of snowflakes.

After the week we’ve had in PA, most of us are feeling pretty intimately acquainted with the weight and power of impossibly light, gentle snowflakes, gathered together. As we’ve been mulling on the theme of Hope, it seemed timely to repost this story from a few years ago.

“Tell me the weight of a snowflake” a coalmouse asked a wild dove.

“Nothing more than nothing” was the answer.

“In that case, I must tell you a marvelous story” the coalmouse said. “I sat on a fir branch close to the trunk when it began to snow; not heavily, not in a raging blizzard, no, just like in a dream, without any violence. Since I didn’t have anything better to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and needles of my branch. Their number was exactly 3,471,952. When the next snowflake dropped onto the branch — nothing more than nothing — as you say — the branch broke off.”Having said that, the coalmouse fled away. The dove, since Noah’s time an authority on the matter, thought about the story for a while and finally said to herself “Perhaps there is only one person’s prayer lacking for peace to come to the world.”

During lunch at PSU IPL’s first Positively Green event, Cricket Hunter read this story, which someone passed on to her many years ago. If anyone recognizes it, please let us know so that we can properly attribute it.